The company we pay to host this website notified us that the servers we're on are ancient (in tech terms) and that they were going to move us to the Cloud using MS Azure, or move us to new servers. Either one would add about $600 - $750 a year in hosting fees. And since this is a member-supported site that depends on your generous donations to stay online, we decided that was too much. So we decided we'd go looking to see if we could keep the costs down ("we" being IT Guru Matt Banks and I, though Matt does the actual work and I just nod sheepishly as if I understand all the jargon). Matt didn't think the Cloud was the right place for us at this time, so we were off in search of a new hosting company.

The first stop had a nice sales pitch based on price. But once we got into the actual discussion with their sales people, the pricing was based on a 3-year contract, and it had to be paid in full up front. Couldn't do it even if we wanted to. So we moved on.

The second place was much better, so we've signed up with them. Monthly billing. No contract. And so far pretty good Tech Support. PLUSSSSSSSS!!!!!!! We might even save a couple of sheckels each year. Yes!

We have until 8/22 to migrate over to the new company and its servers. We're not going to do it in the middle of the night because everyone has lives. So it's going to happen during the day sometime. Which day? We don't know yet. I've asked Matt to tell me when he's going to "throw the switch" so that I can give everyone as much advance notice as possible. But I did want to tell you that it's coming.

As soon as I know what day, what time and approximately how long this migration is going to take (i.e. how long we'll be offline), I'll post it. In the meantime, you all know what we know.

BTW, Mr. Matt Banks has done, and continues to do, an INCREDIBLE job on this website. All kudos to him.

If you're at all technically-minded to the point of caring about this stuff, apparently the original DNS server had the TTL set WAY high (24 hours?) so we're still seeing a bunch of DNS servers pointing to the original server.

In a nutshell, I put a redirect on the old server to point to this server and we're using the IP for now. I'll probably pull that tonight or tomorrow once I see that the old IP has definitely "died."

In other words, if you're seeing "64.91.248.32" for the website name, that's intentional, for now, in order to make it so no one is still using the old server.